Trying to understand the relationship between Bluefin and Universal Blue

[Neikon]

Hi everyone,

First of all, this isn't a criticism. I'm asking because I've been following the project for quite some time and I'm genuinely interested in understanding where things are heading.

I've recently read many of the latest posts about BuildStream, the "Sausage Factory", Dakota, the organizational changes, Project Bluefin, and the new build infrastructure.

They're all really interesting, but they've also left me a bit confused about the relationship between Bluefin and Universal Blue.

From the outside, it feels like there are two different scopes mixed together:

• Some posts are clearly about Bluefin itself.
• Others seem to describe changes that would benefit the entire Universal Blue ecosystem.
• Sometimes there are examples from Bazzite (like the OGC kernel) inside articles published as Bluefin posts.

As someone who follows the ecosystem rather than just one image, I'm finding it increasingly difficult to understand what belongs to Bluefin specifically and what belongs to Universal Blue as a whole.

For example:

• Is BuildStream a Bluefin project that other images may eventually adopt?
• Is the new "factory" intended to become shared infrastructure for all Universal Blue images?
• Is Bluefin becoming the reference implementation where new technologies are developed first?
• Or is Bluefin simply the place where these ideas are currently being documented?

The branding also contributes to my confusion.

Recent changes such as the move to projectbluefin, the factory.projectbluefin.io domain, and the Bluefin blog covering topics that appear to affect multiple projects make it feel as if Bluefin has become the public face of much of Universal Blue.

At the same time, the Press Kit clearly distinguishes between Bluefin and Universal Blue, so I'm wondering what the intended long-term structure is.

Should we think of it like this?

• Universal Blue provides the shared infrastructure and community, while Bluefin, Aurora, Bazzite, uCore, etc. remain independent projects built on top of it.

Or more like this?

• Bluefin is evolving into the central project where the new architecture is developed, with other images gradually adopting that work.

Or is my interpretation completely off?

I realize this might simply be a communication issue rather than a technical one, but I'd really love to understand the long-term vision.

Thanks for building such an interesting ecosystem, and thanks in advance to anyone who can help clarify it.

[castrojo]

Others seem to describe changes that would benefit the entire Universal Blue ecosystem.

This isn't a thing it's a cloud native ecosystem. There's no reason to be exclusive, the entire point is to be like everyone else.

make it feel as if Bluefin has become the public face of much of Universal Blue.

I've been emeritus from universal blue from almost a year I am an inactive contributor. Mission remains the same and unchanged. Things like OGC kernel are us working together with them to expose the kernel to some testers. Kyle (Bazzite) helped out with some tips on there since Bazzite ships the same kernel and it needs testing.

Universal Blue isn't a product it's a github org. I drive an Audi not a "Volkswagen Group MQB Evo Platform".

Is BuildStream a Bluefin project that other images may eventually adopt?

No clue that's up to them, same answer when I worked there. I don't know. 😄

Is the new "factory" intended to become shared infrastructure for all Universal Blue images?

Right now we have a ton of capacity so I'm running as many e2e tests for as many bootc images if I find until we can't. This is more to help bootc adoption, it's actual purpose is to help us test better by grinding tests.

Is Bluefin becoming the reference implementation where new technologies are developed first?

Bluefin will always strive to be the premier reference implementation for bootc and modern linux. Most of it is bootc but bst is apache so we see ourselves as a bridge between the two technologies.

Universal Blue provides the shared infrastructure and community, while Bluefin, Aurora, Bazzite, uCore, etc. remain independent projects built on top of it.

Your overthinking it. It's a shared group of resources, like no one shows up and decides "ublue is doing this let's go in order image to image and do it."

[castrojo]

not writing custom installers to partition people's disks, there ain't time for that

Haha whoops.

[Neikon]

Thank you very much for taking the time to reply.

Your explanation helped me understand that the different projects are much more independent than I had originally thought.

And once again, thank you for creating such a wonderful system.I really appreciate all the work you and the other contributors put into it.

[pfalkingham]

I've been having a really hard time staying up to date with Bluefin. I've been using it for about 6 months now, and mostly loved it, but it really feels like the devs and community care more about how it's made, than what is made, which doesn't fill me with confidence that I can rely on this system.

I can't keep track of which variants are for what - Dakota vs Bluefin just isn't clear at all from the web pages, for instance, beyond some vague philosophy. Bluefin vs Bazzite gnome also don't really seem to be meaninfully different. It feels like there's not a lot between these images in many cases except very minor variations and pre-installed pacakges. And yet... ujust commands aren't common across the images, yet you'd think they would be. Why does bazzite have ujust install-resolve but bluefin doesn't? I guess because each image is maintained and built slightly differently. Yet it's all under the same umbrella. It's become deeply, deeply confusing.

I also made matters worse for myself by moving to bootc, which broke a load of ujust commands (including ujust update), and now I'm on bluefin-nvidia:stable, but fastfetch tells me I'm on bluefin-nvidia:testing So I've no idea if I'm testing half-finished stuff, or if I'm where I'm supposed to be but broke things myself during the update.

It's become a bit of a frustrating chore to try and keep an interest in what's going on with the development, and that undermines the trust in the OS, for me at least.

I'm not going anywhere, I like the OS, and I think I like some of the philosophy behind it, but man it's become super confusing.

[pfalkingham]

I've been having a really hard time staying up to date with Bluefin.

You don't need to do anything 95% of this is information for technical users. If it doesn't affect you you can ignore it. This is all developer information you can just use your computer.

Entirely true.

Dakota vs Bluefin just isn't clear at all from the web pages,

Which ones?

I mean... the pages that list them? But also discussions here. Again, doesn't really affect me directly and I know dakota is still in early stages, but it does appear on the changelogs page right beside bluefin and bluefin LTS implying it's a variation of the same, but the verbiage around it is that it's something new and different at it's core.

Bluefin vs Bazzite gnome also don't really seem to be meaninfully different.
And yet... ujust commands aren't common across the images,

I don't understand how you put yourself in this situation? Why are you expecting this? ujust commands are for initial setup and workarounds - it's not a packaging system.

This one I do take a bit of issue with - sure it's not a packaging system, but it's something to use for workarounds. It's not like Bluefin and Bazzite need different workarounds, surely they benefit from the same set of workarounds and setup options (e.g. see below)

bluefin-nvidia:stable, but fastfetch tells me I'm on bluefin-nvidia:testing

Why are you using fastfetch for this? The command is bootc status.

I'm not using fastfetch for this purpose, but I do use fastfetch, and it clearly conflicts. It also shows 'testing' in bctl.

Why does bazzite have ujust install-resolve but bluefin doesn't?

Why would we have this? We only support Flatpaks.

So does Bazzite? The main bluefin page highlights container use, which is exactly what install-resolve does; sets up a container and puts davinci resolve in it. Also, brew is pretty heavily used in Bluefin (and bbrew, via ujust). I think this illustrates my confusion, probably in line with the OP, that I was under the assumption the ublue OSes had a common core, and that things like ujust were in that core, but clearly not, and that's what's caught me out - I'm surprised by what is and isn't similar between the ublue distros, and it's frustrating when you want to do something in one that another can do (as a singular example here: having briefly rebased between bazzite and bluefin, finding I could easily install resolve on bazzite but not Bluefin was frustrating, double so as I'd assumed commonality in things like ujust).

It's become a bit of a frustrating chore to try and keep an interest in what's going on with the development

You don't need to do any of that, all of the other stuff I'm posting about is opt in for linux nerds, just enjoy your computer.

Fair... but I am on the nerd side for this stuff, and part of enjoying the computer is understanding what's going on around the development of the OS. That's not trivial.

[castrojo]

I'm not using fastfetch for this purpose, but I do use fastfetch, and it clearly conflicts. It also shows 'testing' in bctl.

Yeah there's an issue for this one filed somewhere someone just needs to fix it. We're starting to ramp up development on the fall releases now.

that I was under the assumption the ublue OSes had a common core,

No, modern linuxes are generational shifts. There's no "common core" when everyone can make whatever they want. It's all just linux. ujust is a tool called just, it's just some aliases.

I'm surprised by what is and isn't similar between the ublue distros

I've spent over five years trying to tell people that this isn't a thing so I'm kind of lost now too lol. I don't even know why people think "ublue distros" is a thing. We specifically are telling people that those days are over.

(as a singular example here: having briefly rebased between bazzite and bluefin, finding I could easily install resolve on bazzite but not Bluefin was frustrating, double so as I'd assumed commonality in things like ujust).

You could just copy the script from the justfile and paste it into a terminal or follow the instructions on the website. Or throw it in your own ~/.Justfile that's what it's there for. This is userspace this isn't our place to make an opinion.

EDIT: I think the issue is people think we're a distro and are supposed to do "distro things" like caring about people's applications. Our benefit is to NOT care about that, we're more strict about what is our job and what is yours. I think the reason we removed this is it gives people the impression that Resolve works on Linux.

And then someone is going to say "look how easy it is on Bluefin" and then someone will try it and of course it will break. Then someone will find a way to blame us. They are VERY clear on what Linuxes they support - why would we put ourselves in this position? (That being said we do cheat, the fedora one has all the right libraries for it to Just Work on the host too, we did that on purpose but we don't tell people about it because who knows if it will work tomorrow?)

[castrojo]

Also should have mentioned lots of the update management/etc will be better in the GUI anyway, so lots of the toggle ones will be easier to find, etc.

[ClixTW]

ujust install-resolve is just a script to make installing Resolve with davincibox easier, but using davincibox itself isn't actually difficult, so this ujust command isn't as important as you might think.

I can understand why Bluefin doesn't include this command, because Resolve doesn't run perfectly on Linux, and as Jorge mentioned earlier, it would defy user expectations. Although I eventually found ways to fix them, I ran into the following issues at the time:

• CUDA acceleration on NVIDIA GPUs stopped working after restarting the container. This was an upstream Distrobox issue, which should have been resolved a few months ago.
• Text input via input methods like Fcitx5 and ibus didn't work properly. This was caused by Resolve's Qt build and required replacing certain files in Resolve to fix it.

If you need Resolve, just follow the instructions in the README to install it. It's actually really straightforward!

[wegweg7979]

Bluefin does not only support flatpak software, else what is the point of distrobox, podman being included. A davincibox is exactly the kind of use case bluefin is made for.